Sextortion profits decline despite higher volume, new techniques
Summary: Cisco Talos found over 1 million sextortion emails sent between January and March 2019 to only about 29,000 unique recipients, an average of 38 messages per target, with roughly 9,000 unique Bitcoin addresses across the set. The addresses held about 3.5 BTC, roughly $17,000, down from the $150,000 the same attackers obtained in two months last fall, and the campaign added HTML character entities, image spam, and ZIP and PDF attachments demanding $25 to $50 for a password.
Bottom line: The same actors who pulled in $150,000 last fall collected about $17,000 this time, yet kept sending over a million messages, and Talos expects them to pivot to other tricks as sextortion efficacy declines.
Read the original at Cisco Talos ↗
- Topics
- Malware
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